I
Dr. Joseph Elm said: “Look, Miss MacDonald, I’m not asking you to say
whether or not you’ll take the case. All I’m asking you to do is to
read these letters.”
“Letters,” Lynn MacDonald explained, “that pertain to a murder
committed twenty-eight years ago. Many of them, you have told me,
written by a twelve-year-old child. Yes, I admit the fact that the
child was Lucy Quilter does make some difference—but not enough. The
remainder written by a boy who since has confessed to the murder. At
the very best, I could form a theory or two. Any possibility of
proving those theories has been removed by time. I am sorry, Dr. Elm,
but——”
“Will you read these letters, just read them, I mean, for five hundred
dollars?”
“My time——”
“Yes. I know about time. Everybody’s time. Will you read them for a
thousand dollars?”
“I am not a highway robber, Dr. Elm.”
“No? Well, bless my soul to glory if I know what you are. You’re a
darn good crime analyst, or so I hear. But if you’re not a better
analyst than you are a woman, you’ve nothing to show. Look. As a
woman, you’re a mess. You haven’t any kindness, or patience, or
sympathy—not even pity. You haven’t any courage—afraid to take a
chance. You haven’t much of anything but lack of time.”
He settled back patiently in his chair. If he had guessed rightly
about that red hair and those clear gray eyes, something was going to
happen in half a minute now.
Lynn MacDonald stood, tall, behind her desk.
“Perhaps you are right,” she said. “Certainly you are right about my
lack of time. I have no time to sit here and listen to insults from
importunate strangers.”
Dr. Elm added to his patience an air of solid permanence.
“Funny thing,” he offered, “about women. Tell them the truth and
ninety-nine out of a hundred will think you are insulting them. I kind
of figured, maybe you’d be the hundredth. But I see now where I made
my mistake. I should have tried to wheedle instead of——”
“Bullying,” supplied Miss MacDonald.
“All right. Look. I’ve found out one thing you’ve got—that’s a temper.
Glad to see it. Makes you a person. You’re Scotch-Irish, I judge. Best
debtors in the world. Never had a Scotch-Irish bill yet that wasn’t
paid. Look. You won’t read those letters for love or money. Will you
read them to pay a debt?
“Hold on. Let me tell you. I’m a professional man, same as you’re a
professional woman. I’ve got a consulting room, too. It isn’t near as
stylish as this one of yours. One thing, I’ve had it forty-odd years,
and it’s kind of worn down some, and rubbed off. Another thing, I
don’t much favour elegant consulting rooms. Patients likely to get
impressed. ’Tisn’t a good thing to impress your patients. Many a
stomachache has turned into appendicitis just from the patient being
ashamed to own up to an ordinary stomach ache in the midst of walnut
furniture and Persian rugs. Look. Here’s what I’m getting to.
“I’ve been sitting up there, afternoons, for the past forty years.
I’ve had time and patience, all that while, to listen to women—two
thirds of them nervous, hysterical things, poor souls—telling me about
their backaches, and their numb spells, and their throbbing heads.
Until the last ten years or so about all I could do was to listen, and
then pat them on the shoulders, and tell them they were fine, brave
girls, and give them some healthy advice, and send them home. About
all I can do yet, for that matter. Say psychiatrist to most women and
they’ll up and act like you did just now when I was trying to tell you
something. No. I sit and cluck, like an old hen eating, and listen. I
suppose the time I’ve wasted listening to and pitying your
sister-women would aggregate about twenty years. Money doesn’t pay for
it—if I got paid with money, which I generally don’t, because I can’t
cure them. Thanks might pay, but I’ve never got thanked—much. (‘Old
Dr. Elm simply could not find what my trouble was. So I went to young
Dr. Sawbones, and he cut it right out. I wouldn’t have lived three
months without the operation.’) But I’ve kept along. I’ll go back,
when I leave here, and sit up there and listen, and cluck, till I die.
But I’ve always kind of thought, maybe, sometime I’d get paid back.
I’ve never asked a favour of a woman in my life, Miss MacDonald. Never
even asked a girl to marry me. Well, I’m asking a favour now. You can
read these letters in less than the time you could read a novel. How
about it? A couple of evenings, as pay for twenty years? And if you
tell me there’s no reason why you should pay for all the time I’ve
given to your sister-women, I’ll tell you that, come to it, there
generally isn’t a reason for most of the fine, grand things folks have
done. Florence Nightingale, Father Damien, or——”
Lynn MacDonald, sitting behind her desk, resting her chin on her
bridging fingers, smiled. “Or,” she questioned, “Dr. Joseph Elm?”
“I get you. It’s below the belt, all the same.”
“But, no, you didn’t ‘get’ me. I meant, any real reason for him to
come here and offer me what he has just offered me. Oh, yes. I know
what it is. In spite of your opinion of me, I have some of it
myself—in payment for a service, not for himself, but for friends of
his?”
“Well, of course, if it comes to that, the Quilters have always seemed
a lot more like relations than friends.”
“I see. Now, then, Dr. Elm, since I am to read the letters, perhaps if
you could give me just the outlines of the case? None of the details,
but facts enough to allow me to study the letters with some
understanding from the beginning?”
“Yes, you bet. That’s what I thought, too. If we could kind of whittle
through the thing together, before you began on the letters, it might
save you a lot of time.”
Miss MacDonald’s pink palms met meekly in her lap. Her face was quiet,
but the comprehension in her gray eyes was visible.
II
“Here,” said Dr. Elm, “we are.” He produced a derelict notebook from
his pocket, and flicked through it with a dampened forefinger. “Yes.
I’ve made out a list of characters—like in a play——”
“First, if you will,” suggested Miss MacDonald, “I’d rather hear,
again, the outlines of the case. Where the murder was done, when, and
how. Later, perhaps, the people who were on the premises at the time
would be helpful. I have understood you to say that Richard Quilter
was shot when he was in bed in his room at night. That the absence of
a weapon precluded all possibilities of suicide. That a rope was found
hanging from his window, out across a porch roof beneath the window,
and to the ground. That the freshly fallen snow on the roof and the
rope indicated that the rope had not been used as a means for escape.
That careful searching of the grounds that night, particularly in
front of each window and door, seemed to prove that no one had left
the house after the shot was heard.”
“That’s right, so far; exactly right. Now let me see. Yes, here it is.
The time was Monday around midnight, on the eighth of October, in the
year 1900. The place was the Quilters’ big cattle ranch, Q 2 Ranch, in
Quilter County, eastern Oregon.”
“Perhaps,” suggested Miss MacDonald, with a last clutch at her dinner
engagement, “if you have it all written in the notebook, you might
leave it, with the letters?”
Dr. Elm squeezed the book shut and sunk it into his pocket. “You
couldn’t,” he explained, “make heads or tails of that. Let me see.
Where was I?
“Oh, yes. On Monday night, October the eighth, the Quilter family went
to bed early, as usual. Irene Quilter, the young bride of Christopher
Quilter (Chris was Richard’s—Dick’s—cousin) couldn’t sleep, so she got
up about ten o’clock, put on her slippers and her wrapper, took a
candle and went downstairs to the sitting room. She lighted the
hanging lamp down there, and poked up the fire, and read until a
little after eleven o’clock. Then she went back upstairs. When she
tried to go into her room and Chris’s, she found that the door was
locked.
“Now Irene, like most people who haven’t much pride, was awfully
precious with what she did have. She was too proud to knock. Also, it
made her mad all over to think Chris had locked her out. She turned
around and sneaked straight downstairs again, and fixed herself a bed,
with Indian blankets, on the sofa in the sitting room.
“I judge that the more she thought about it the madder she got. You
see, she and Chris had had a little tiff before he went to sleep. She
decided that Chris would be ashamed of himself pretty soon—as he would
have been, sure enough, if he’d played such a mean trick on his
wife—and come downstairs to find her and to try to make it up. So what
does she do but bolt the door to the back stairway—it came down into
the sitting room—and go into the front hall and bolt the door to the
front stairway. (It comes out in the letters how the Quilters were
never much for locking doors. But they had to have bolts on these
stairway doors so that they wouldn’t blow open and bang in the winter,
when they tried to keep the upstairs shut off.) Locking Chris
out—showing him two could play at that lock-out game, as she put
it—made Irene feel enough better so that she cozied right up in her
sofa bed to cry, but, by mistake, she dropped off to sleep. The next
thing she knew she heard a revolver shot upstairs. It sounded,
everybody said, like a cannon in the quiet of the place.
“She jumped up, lighted her candle, got into her wrapper and slippers,
and ran upstairs. When she reached the upper hall, she must have
thought everybody had gone crazy, for they were all pounding on their
doors, on the inside, and shaking them, and shouting. They were, like
I told you a while ago, all locked in their rooms. She ran down the
hall toward Chris’s and her room. When she came to Dick’s room she saw
that the door was open and a lamp was lighted in there, so she ran in.
She found Dick in bed, shot though the left chest.
“She ran to him. The window was wide open. That wasn’t the custom in
those days—three inches down from the top—and she said he turned his
eyes toward the open window and muttered something that sounded like
‘Got away.’ At first Irene was sure he had said ‘Got away.’ Later,
when folks quizzed her, she admitted that he might have said, ‘Go
away.’ But his next words, she declared up and down, were, ‘Red mask.’
“She kind of lifted him up—worst thing in the world to do, of course,
but Irene was an awfully stupid woman—and then he said the names of
his three children: ‘Neal, Judith, Lucy.’ It was then, Irene said,
when she was stooping over him, that she got blood on the front of her
wrapper and on her sleeve.
“She thought he wanted the children brought to him; but she didn’t
like to leave him, and she didn’t know what to do. She had it firmly
fixed in her mind, in spite of what he had tried to say when he
glanced toward the window, that he had shot himself; so she never
thought of asking him even one question. She wouldn’t. Well, anyway,
she finally started to go for Neal and Lucy—Judith wasn’t at home—and
he spoke out again and said, ‘Wait, Father.’ He meant his own father,
Thaddeus Quilter.
“Irene went back to Dick and he said, clearer this time, putting all
his strength into it, ‘Bring Father. I must tell him.’ He repeated,
‘Must tell Father,’ and that was the end.
“Sometime, during all of this, it had dawned on her what the trouble
in the hall was. I mean, that the family were all locked in their
rooms. Right there on Dick’s bedside table, under his lamp, she saw a
scatter of keys. She put them in her wrapper pocket and ran out and
unlocked the doors. All the locks upstairs were the same; otherwise
Irene never would have got the keys sorted out and the doors unlocked,
I guess. Lucy’s door was opposite Dick’s, so Irene unlocked it first.
Neal was in Lucy’s room. They ran across the hall—Irene had said,
‘Your father,’ to them—but it was too late. Dick was dead when Lucy
reached him. That’s the story, as briefly as I can tell it.”
“He lived and was conscious for some few minutes after he was shot.
How about the position of the bed? Would there have been any
possibility that he could have thrown the revolver from him, through
the open window?”
“Look. The bed was ten or twelve feet from the window. The gun would
have had to land on the porch roof, just beneath the window. The snow
on the roof was unbroken. There was nothing on it, or in it, except
the rope. The only other gun in the room was on the top shelf of a
closet, the length of the room, at least twenty feet, from the bed. It
was found fully loaded. Now about the rope——”
“Forgive me, Dr. Elm. You got your details from the letters, didn’t
you?”
“Yes. Of course I’d heard a lot of talk at the time. I got to Q 2 as
fast as I could after they sent me word. I got there early Wednesday
morning. But I’d forgotten some, and most of the details I never had
any too straight, anyway. I was too busy looking after the family to
take the interest I should have, maybe. Anyhow, what I really thought,
in spite of heck and high water, was that some dirty cur had got into
the house and killed the boy and got out again—some way or other. It
was what I wanted to believe, so I’ve kept at believing it until—here
recently.”
“These letters, nothing else, have forced you to change your mind?”
“That’s about the size of it, I guess.”
“The letters, that is, which recount all the findings of the murder,
and which were written by the person who has since confessed to it?”
“Yes. Neal wrote them, thank the Lord. If he hadn’t written these
letters when he was eighteen, it might be a lot harder for us now when
he is forty-six.”
“I see. Now, then, if you will, tell me about the people who were in
the house at the time. Then, when I begin to read the letters, I can
recognize the members of the family, and the others, in their proper
relationships.”
III
Dr. Elm said: “Miss MacDonald, I’ve never won any fame for driving a
hard bargain, and I don’t care about starting to this late in life.
You’ve agreed to read the letters; nothing else. If you say the word,
I’ll begin right here with descriptions of the family. But, look; you
mentioned relationships. There’s another relationship that is mighty
important. I mean the relationship of the Quilter family, for the past
two hundred and some years, to their environment. You can’t snatch a
parcel of folks away from their backgrounds and then account for the
way the folks act. People live in a pattern. Whether the pattern is
entirely of their own formation, or whether it isn’t, hasn’t much of
anything to do with it. The pattern is there—just as sure as it is
here in this pretty rug of yours. And, to see folks honestly, you have
to see them with relation to their pattern. This is so true that, if
you haven’t their right pattern, you’ll give them another. That’s why
I quarrel with the Behaviourists.
“Now as soon as you begin to read Lucy’s letters you’ll begin to
wonder. They don’t sound like the letters of a little back-country
ranch girl. And Neal’s don’t sound like the letters of a country
bumpkin, nor yet of a buckaroo in eastern Oregon in 1900. From start
to finish of these letters, you’ll be bothered finding the original
Quilter pattern. I can give it to you in five minutes, if you’ll let
me. Will you?”
“But,” began Miss MacDonald, and amended a quick, “of course.” She
refused herself a glance at her wrist watch and repeated, by way of
improvement, “But of course.”
“Well, then, in 1624 James the First made a big land grant in Virginia
to Sir Christopher Quilter—tenth great grandfather, the children call
him. You know your American history well enough to know that the fact
that Sir Christopher and his wife Delidah stayed right there and
succeeded in laying the foundations for a great family estate means
something. I could spend all afternoon telling you Quilter history,
but I won’t. Right from then on it is a history of decent, striving,
successful men and women, with heroes scattered thick as fleas on a
dog’s back. One of the Quilters was a warm personal friend of
Washington’s—so on.
“In 1848 the original grant, or most of it, was still owned by a
Christopher Quilter. He had three sons: Christopher, Thaddeus, and
Phineas. When Christopher and Thaddeus had come of age, the old man
had given them free leases on plantations of their own—slaves and all.
These two lads had been educated at Oxford. That gave them a chance,
maybe, to get a perspective on the question of slavery.
“Christopher, the eldest son, was thirty years old in 1848. Thaddeus,
the second son, was twenty-eight years old. Phineas, the youngest, was
fifteen. He was in England. Well, the two older boys put their heads
together and decided to leave the South. They hated slavery, like most
decent men did. Also, they hated the sectional differences; and being
as smart as some and smarter than most, both of them saw pretty well
what was going to happen in the nation, sooner or later.
“They talked it over with their father, of course, and he agreed with
them, right down to the ground. He was less of an abolitionist, maybe,
than his sons were. But he thought that the South would secede and get
away with it—and he hated the idea worse than poison. He’d have come
with the boys to the Oregon territory, I think, but for the question
of the slaves on the plantation.
“Maybe you’ve heard about fine, grand abolitionists in the South who
freed their slaves and went North? Yes. Look, maybe you’ve heard, too,
about people who moved and left their cats, free as air, to starve.
Decent Southerners, in those days, didn’t free their slaves and walk
off. No more than a decent father, nowadays, frees his children and
walks off.
“No, siree. Great-grandfather Quilter sold the two plantations that
his sons had been managing, and gave them the money he got for them.
Christopher and Thaddeus took the money, and their wives, and came out
to Oregon in 1848. Great-grandfather stayed in Virginia, and took care
of the slaves until he died, during the last year of the Civil War.
“Sure, Christopher and Thaddeus came as wealthy men. But I don’t need
to tell you that they gave up lives of luxury and ease for the
hardships of pioneering. They had two reasons. I don’t know which
loomed larger to them. One was to get clear shed of the wickedness of
slavery. The second was to found another family estate in a safe land.
Phineas and Thaddeus both fought on the side of the North during the
war. When the war was over, they came home to the Q 2 Ranch. And there
they’ve lived and raised their families; and there their children and
their children’s children are living up to now, 1928. Pretty
decent-looking pattern? Nearly as I can judge it’s made of material
that hasn’t any wrong side to it, nor any seams. That is, until this
cussed murder business ripped through it in 1900.
“Christopher, the eldest brother, and his wife had both died by that
time, and Thaddeus Quilter was the head of the family. He was eighty
years old in 1900. Eighty years of the finest, cleanest, most
holy-honest living that a man ever put through. He was the father of
the murdered boy, Richard Quilter. He was the father of the lady
called Aunt Gracia in the letters. And he was the grandfather of
Richard’s three children: Neal, Judith, and Lucy. Their grandmother,
Thaddeus Quilter’s wife, had been dead a good many years.
“Taking them in the order of their ages, Phineas Quilter, the youngest
of the three brothers, you know, comes next. He was sixty-seven years
old in 1900, and he was a great old boy. He’d spent a good part of his
time hunting for gold mines in Oregon and Nevada; he never fared very
far, but he fared often. It was his diversion. He was a
happy-go-lucky, but good—good as his gold all the way through. He was
a cut-up, strong for practical jokes—all like that. A little gay and
fizzy in his youth, maybe; but he came out fine and mellow in his old
age. His wife called him Pan when she was in a real good humour. He
liked it. That gives a slant, maybe. But don’t forget that, like
Thaddeus Quilter, he was a fine, honourable old gentleman. Phineas
loved Dick like he would have loved his own son, if he’d had one.
“Olympe, Phineas’s wife, comes next in order of age. She was all
right, a real nice lady. Phineas met her when he went South, after the
war, to try to settle up the estate. She was what they used to call a
reigning beauty. She was studying elocution, and hoping to be a great
actress. So Phineas met her, and married her a few weeks later, and
brought her out to Oregon to live on a cattle ranch—de luxe, but a
frontier ranch, just the same. Nowadays the marriage might have wound
up in a divorce court, in spite of the fact that they loved each other
a lot, right up to the end. Anyway, Olympe did what women in those
days generally did do, she stayed married, and made the best of it. I
can sort of imagine her thinking it over, those first months on the
ranch, looking far across the sage and the bunch grass to the hills,
and saying to herself something like this: ‘I wished to be a famous
actress. I could have been, too, if I hadn’t fallen for this young
Lochinvar-came-out-of-the-West stuff. Well, I did. Here I am, stranded
on an eastern Oregon cattle ranch. By Jolly, I’ll be a great actress
anyway.’ And then she went to it.
“From that day on she used the Q 2 Ranch for her stage, and acted on
it, with the family and their friends for her lifelong audience. Now
here’s the catch in it. This acting business made her seem like more
or less of a fool. Yet the whole family loved her and respected her.
Folks will give love free, sometimes, but they won’t give respect
free. Olympe had to earn that. Bless my soul to glory, if I know how
she earned it—but she did. She was selfish. She didn’t know much about
gratitude. She was vain. She slipped up on a lot of the virtues. And
yet, I respected her, and I respect her memory. I used to puff all up
with pride when she’d deign to be nice to me.
“That covers the oldsters. Did you get them? Thaddeus Quilter, father
of the murdered man; Phineas Quilter and his wife Olympe, uncle and
aunt of the murdered man?”
“Yes. I have them straight.”
“Dick himself would be next of age. Do you want to hear about him?”
“By all means; yes.”
“Well, he took after his father, Thaddeus Quilter. Dick was more of a
plodder, not quite so brilliant nor quite so interesting as the old
gentleman, maybe, but not dull; not by a long shot. Bone-good, Dick
was—a fine, honourable, hard-working lad. He married young, and he
loved his wife enough to make her happy. It busted Dick all up when
she died. But he didn’t brood. He took what energy he might have put
into grieving and used it toward being a darn fine father to the three
children she’d left him. Dick worshipped his own father—but all the
Quilters did that. I’m bound to say that it was Dick, more than the
old gentleman, who pulled the Q 2 Ranch through the lean years and
kept it from going under. Dick loved Q 2 like a mother. He had to
mortgage, but he never sold an acre of it. Not even when young
Christopher, Dick’s cousin, was spending a small fortune off it,
gallivanting around back East and in Europe.
“Gracia Quilter comes next—Dick’s sister, the old gentleman’s one
daughter. She was a healthy, sweet-hearted, normal girl until she got
kind of soured because of a mighty unfortunate love affair. Right
after that, by cracky, she embarrassed the family a lot by up and
joining a new-fangled religious sect that called themselves
Siloamites. You never hear anything at all about them any more, but
they were pretty strong in Oregon and Idaho and around there for a
while. They were all right, a fine class of people. I never knew
better folks, anywhere, than the general run of them. A couple of
handsome young missionaries came along and caught Gracia on the
rebound from this love affair. She was emotional, and something of a
mystic—she took after her mamma in that. So she up and joins the
church, and gets baptized and everything. Never did her nor anybody
else a mite of harm that I could see. One of the Siloamite tenets was
never to thrust their religion on other folks. But the Quilter family,
including even the old gentleman, felt pretty sorry about the whole
thing.”
“Did her religion amount to fanaticism? Did it in any way seem to
affect her mind?”
“No, not a bit of it. Not a bit of it. I’m mentioning it because it
seems to me to be the one rift in the Quilters’ lute. The one thing
that any Quilter ever did that all the other Quilters didn’t root for.
You know, like Chesterton’s neighbours, sitting on the fence and
shouting ‘Hooray!’ Something about Chesterton always reminded me a
little of Phineas. Great old boys, both of them—though Phineas
certainly kept his figure better.
“Well, that brings us to Christopher. He was the elder Christopher’s
son. Makes him a nephew of Thaddeus Quilter’s, and a cousin of Dick’s.
Chris was the real showy member of the family. Handsome, as ladies
used to say, as a Greek god. He took more after his Uncle Phineas than
he did after his father. Though instead of dreaming he’d find a gold
mine, Chris dreamed he could write plays. I don’t know, yet, why he
couldn’t. He’d had a fine education, here and abroad, and he was real
smart. But he couldn’t; and he wasted a pile of the family’s money
trying to. Chris was selfish, and too easily influenced. Still, you’d
go far before you’d find a better lad than Chris was. He is a fine
man, too; and, as I always say, he’s getting better all the time.
“Just like his Uncle Phineas, though, he went and married an Eastern
girl who didn’t have a mite of talent for an isolated ranch. Her name,
Irene, didn’t live up to its Greek meaning. I can’t say that I ever
liked Irene much; still, there was always something amiable about my
dislike for her. She was one of these irritatingly helpmate-ish sort
of women. Never knew a stupid woman to marry a real smart man and not
try to run him.”
“You think, then, that Irene—Mrs. Christopher Quilter—was a stupid
woman? And, also, an egotistical woman?”
“Was and is. Look. She, as they say nowadays, goes in for it. She’s
sort of deliberately arch—if you know what I mean. One of the
poor-little-me type. But she has more to show than I have—a couple of
fine sons and a sweet little daughter, so I don’t know why I should be
running her down. She’s been a true wife to Chris.
“Judy, Mrs. Judith Quilter Whitefield, Dick’s eldest daughter, comes
next. She was in Colorado at the time, taking care of her invalid
husband. Married only a year——”
“Perhaps, Dr. Elm, to avoid confusion, if we could keep to the people
who were at the ranch on the night of the murder?”
“That’s right. But here I went and told you all about Phineas, and he
wasn’t at the ranch the night Dick was murdered, either.”
“It doesn’t matter. Now, the others?”
“Neal Quilter was next of age. Dick’s son. The one who wrote the
letters to Judy. The one on whose account we need to get this thing
straightened out. He took after his father and grandfather. Bone-good.
Smart as a whip. Never had any real schooling to amount to anything.
His grandfather and his Aunt Gracia taught him. The kid was reading
Latin better than I could when he was ten years old. When he was
eighteen he passed the entrance examinations for Oregon Agricultural
College and was graduated from it just two years later, with all the
honours. He was keen about writing, always scribbling things at odd
minutes. But he couldn’t serve two masters, and Q 2 was his passion.
His grandfather was his idol; but he loved his father better than most
boys do. Chris’s sons think a pile of Chris, but it isn’t like the way
Neal thought of Dick.
“Lucy Quilter, the little girl who wrote the letters, comes next. She
was twelve years old at the time, small and dainty, and pretty as a
peach—is yet. At twelve she was the bud of what she’s bloomed into
since. I guess, from what you said, I don’t need to tell you what she
is now.”
“Scarcely. It must be marvellous to know her as you do.”
“That’s what I think, when I’m away from her. Soon as I get with her I
forget that she’s a famous lady, and start trying to boss her about
her babies, or to advise her about taking care of her health better,
or something of the kind. She’s as simple as common sense—and as rare.
Let me see—Neal, Lucy. Yes, that finishes off the list.”
“No servants? No visitors?”
“From 1893 to 1900 were the seven lean years on the Q 2 Ranch. They
had a Chinese house boy, Dong Lee. But, aside from him, Gracia and
Judy—until she went away—with Lucy’s help were doing all the inside
work. Dick and Neal were doing most of the outside work. They had to
have help, of course; but they got the neighbouring men to come in
when they needed them. So many of the ranches went under in ’93 and
’94 that help was easy enough to get that way, in those days. But Dong
Lee wasn’t there the night Dick was killed. He’d been having trouble
with his teeth—Dong Lee, that is—and he’d gone to Portland to see a
dentist.
“Now as to visitors. Gracia had had a couple of her church friends,
missionaries, there on the place for ten days. There was one room
built in the attic, and the boys had occupied it. But they’d left the
day before. Nice, clean lads, both of them. I always thought it was a
lucky thing for them that they were well out of it.”
“You are certain that they both had left?”
“Look. Dick was killed on Monday night, around midnight. Late Monday
afternoon the two lads were in my office in Portland, a matter of two
hundred miles distant (remember we didn’t have automobiles in those
days), delivering a message from Dick to me. He wanted a prescription
refilled and sent to him.”
“Was he ill at the time?”
“Yes. Dick had been having a lot of trouble with his stomach.”
“Had it made him unpleasant, difficult to live with?”
“It had not. Quieted him down a mite. I think that is an
over-exploited theory, about pain making folks mean. If they’re
naturally mean, it gives them an excuse for indulging. In my
experience, I’ve found that real suffering is anyway as apt to make a
saint as a sinner. But that’s beside the point, I guess.”
“No, I think not. But about these visitors. I suppose you are certain
that the two men who came to your office, with the message, were the
same two men who had been visiting at the farm?”
“At the ranch? Yes, dead certain. I’d known the lads before. I knew
them afterward. Not a shadow of doubt about it.”
“I see. Now, then, Dr. Elm, the situation you have presented to me
amounts to this:
“First, you give me stately, unassailable traditions. That is,
traditions based on proven performances of integrity, stability,
courage, reaching through two hundred years. Then you give me the
Quilter family of 1900, true to these traditions—wise, honourable,
cultured people, with strong family loyalty and affection. A dearly
loved member of this family is found murdered in his room at night.
That a member of the Quilter family, which you have presented to me,
could be guilty of such a crime seems to be entirely without the
bounds of reason.
“But there was newly fallen snow that night. No one could have gone
away from the house without leaving footprints in the snow. You
declare that there were no footprints. Someone might have hidden in
the house, and remained there until escape was possible. One of your
first insistences was that, because of the reliability of the people
who searched the house, no one could have been hiding there. Also, the
house was so carefully guarded that an escape, after the first hour,
would have been impossible.
“Do you see it? You have precluded all possibility that the murder was
committed by a member of the Quilter family. You have precluded all
possibility that the murder was committed by anyone who was not a
member of the Quilter family. And you state that it happened
twenty-eight years ago.
“Wait. You are a reasonable, sensible man. Why didn’t you tell me, at
first, that you didn’t expect, nor entirely desire, me to arrive at
the truth? That you wanted a sound-seeming theory, which could be
evolved from the letters, and which might, by fixing on some guilty
stranger, cure your friend of his delusion? I may be able to do that
for you. If I can do it, harmlessly, I will. I know, as you know, that
I can’t do better than that.”
“I hate to hear you talk that way, my girl. Quitting before you’ve
begun. I sized you up as having more spunk than that. One thing I
admired the most about you was your spunk and——”
“Temper your admiration, Dr. Elm. You aren’t in your consulting room
just now, you know.”
“I don’t think that’s very nice of you, Miss MacDonald, trying to
abash an old, white-haired man like me.”
“I only wish that I thought I had, or could. Your methods shame
Machiavelli. I’m in terror of you. You’ve bullied me into reading your
letters. You’ve bullied me into promising a harmless lie. If the
harmless lie seems inadequate, you’ll doubtless bully me into a
pernicious one, and the penitentiary.”
Dr. Elm said, “Bless your heart,” stood, put his overcoat across his
arm, bowed; and, though his two hundred and fifty pounds would seem to
necessitate a definite solidity of carriage, Lynn MacDonald was left
with the impression that some gentle breeze had wafted him delicately
away.
She smiled, the rueful smile of grudging admiration confronting the
confusion of charm and guile. She looked at her watch. It was too late
to go home and dress and keep her dinner engagement; it was too early
for anything else. An hour’s reading should take her far through the
letters. Then home, and dinner, and the restful evening she had been
needing for so long. First, the list of people, again:
1. Richard Quilter: the murdered man.
2. Thaddeus Quilter: Richard’s father.
3. Phineas Quilter: Richard’s uncle.
4. Olympe Quilter: Richard’s aunt. Phineas’s wife.
5. Gracia Quilter: Richard’s sister.
6. Christopher Quilter: Richard’s cousin.
7. Irene Quilter: Christopher Quilter’s wife.
8. Neal Quilter: Richard’s son.
9. Lucy Quilter: Richard’s daughter.
Dr. Elm had told her that Phineas Quilter was not at the Q 2 Ranch on
the night of the murder. She put a check beside his name, and reached
for the smaller packet of letters.